The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute: He bid me taste of it and ’twas–the Grape! Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.Ĭame stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape Starts for the Dawn of Nothing–Oh, make haste! One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste – How Time is slipping underneath our Feet: “Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.”Īh, fill the cup – what boots it to repeat Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:Īnd Lo! the Hunter of the East has caughtĭreaming when Dawn’s Left Hand was in the Sky I suppose it was the verses that celebrated the pleasures of earthly life – wine, love, song – over the uncertain promise of the afterlife which held my attention: During all the years that this little book has been in the house, I knew little of the man who originally penned its verses a millennium ago, only that they had been translated by the Victorian scholar Edward FitzGerald. I’ve never read the Rubaiyaat in its entirety, but I have dipped into a rather beautiful edition of Rita’s, published by the Folio Society in 1955 (above).
These are the first sentences of Samarkand, an early novel by Amin Maalouf that I read recently, drawn to it because in it, Maalouf weaves together fact and fiction in a story that has at its heart the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, written in Samarkand in 1072. Out of such an incident the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat was to be born in the summer of 1072. They came not to taste the musky wine of Soghdia but to watch the comings and goings or to waylay a carouser who would then be forced down into the dust, showered with insults, and cursed into a hell whose fire, until the end of all time, would recall the ruddiness of the wine’s enticements. Sometimes in Samarkand, in the evening of a slow and dreary day, city dwellers would come to while the time away at the dead-end Street of Two Taverns, near the pepper market.
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